Saturday, January 22, 2011

My dad has always been on the lookout for a good deal. On this day he took us to a Potluck auction. I don't know if they still have them, or what they're called now.

Basically, a moving/storage company auctions off unclaimed goods. Some of it is typical, like furniture, but the Potluck part is where they sell off big unopened packing boxes that were never picked up. So you have no idea what you're getting. Every bidder dreams of buying a forgotten box with something valuable in it.

I'd never been to an auction before. It was certainly interesting to watch and listen to. Dad bid on a few items that he didn't win. I vividly remember them dragging a large refrigerator out on stage. After the winning bid had been placed they were rolling it off for the new owner to claim, when suddenly the entire door fell off.

My parents spent time looking over the displayed boxes very carefully. Dad was particularly taken with one box. It was unusually heavy for it's size, and all bound up in tape and twine. It was, as best I remember, roughly 2-3 feet on each side. Across the top, in big letters, it said "TBC".

Anyway, at some point 2 guys carried the TBC box out, and the bidding began. Somewhere in there Dad entered the competition, and after a flurry of bidding, he'd won! My sister and I were excited, and cheered. We had no idea what had happened, except that our dad had won. The box cost $14.83 (including tax). I'd guess in today's terms it would be $50-$60.

It was HEAVY. It took both my parents and a guy pushing a dolly to get it out to the car, and I don't remember if the trunk closed all the way. We got home, and with much pushing and shoving got it into the kitchen.

Mom and Dad got out some knives and hacked their way through the heavy wrapping. We were all excited. It contained...

A Telephone Book Collection.

Yes, someone (who apparently needed a life) had collected phone directories from major cities all over the U.S.: Boston, New York, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, and many others. All neatly stacked in the box.

With quiet disappointment, the box was closed and put in the garage.

I'd forgotten all about it a few weeks later, when it was my birthday party. I had a bunch of friends over. We had the usual cake, presents, and games. And as they were getting ready to go my dad offered each kid... a phone directory.

It's been almost 40 years. I don't remember if any of them took one. Or what finally happened to the box.

My dad would have bought the box, too. Come to think of it, he probably would have bought a lot more stuff. He enjoyed going to garage sales and buying stuff to fix, and then having his own garage sale. He was amazingly good at reselling other people's junk, and I'm guessing he could have talked someone into buying those phone books. And embarrassing the life out of my siblings and I in the process.

Dear other anonymous person up there: you are my hero! I find it slightly disturbing that doctors, that have way longer education that I could ever hope to get, don't use simple grammar rules. Hell, I'm more or less a high school drop-out, (well, barely graduate, then,) and I know how to use it!

Regulars at woot.com, a website that offers one-day-only sales, prize the ever hard to get "Bag of Crap." You pay $1, plus $5 shipping, and you get a mystery box.

The daily sale at woot.com changes at 1am Eastern. For each sale there is a limited number of items (anywhere from 1 to oo), though they do not tell you how many there are, and when they sell out that's it for the day.

Most of the time a "Bag of Crap" sells out within a minute or two. Their last "Bag of Crap" went on sale at 01:00 Eastern 12/25/2010. I managed to get one.

It took two weeks to get here. The box was pretty big. Inside was: A box containing 3 boxes, each holding a gym bag. A small backpack with a PGA logo on it. 2 baseball caps with a PGA logo in it. A bigger gym bag with a PGA logo on it. And a Plantronics bluetooth headset.

There's actually a new reality show on some network (TLC maybe?) about storage units. Units that have gone defunct are kept for a certain amount of time and then gathered together to auction. I guess they give the people like two minutes to look inside and then start the bidding. Seems like fun to me, now if only I had the time or disposable income to get involved in speculative purchasing like that...

I paid about a buck and a half for a box like that. I was delighted to get them because my kids used them as building bricks for forts from age four until the impulse to make a fort and move in wore off. By the time they outgrew the fort stage the books were molting, ratty and recycling for phone books was up and running.It was a great buy. It also inspired my son to give a much younger cousin a refrigerator carton for Christmas, an epic gift well remembered by the kid.

My dad was building our house in the early 70s. While he was working on the wiring at one end of the large empty rooms, my mother volunteered to her Altar Society to store the goods for the annual church rummage sale. For two months the annex under construction overflowed with brown bags of clothing and jewelry and old shoes and purses and just about anything that one wanted to get rid of.

Today, I was looking for a book of Asterix written in German today at the public library and came across a book on Yiddish for Dummies, and the first word I saw would describe the stuff in those empty room perfectly: CHOZZERAI, I think.

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

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